Palestinian ambassador protests to Foreign Office over ’erasure’ by British Museum

The Palestinian ambassador to the UK has called for Foreign Office intervention after the British Museum removed references to Palestine from its exhibits.

The UK recognised the state of Palestine in September 2025, but the same year the museum removed the name “Palestine” from a panel listing the present-day countries encompassed by the ancient Levant, and replaced it with Gaza and the West Bank.

The ambassador, Husam Zomlot, has demanded its restoration, and called for discussions with the museum over the removal of “Palestine” and “Palestinian” from the explanatory panels of a number of exhibits in the ancient Levant and Egyptian rooms.

Zomlot said it was a historical “erasure” at a time when Israel was conducting a campaign of destruction against Palestinians that several human rights organisations and a report by a UN independent commission have deemed is a genocide.

Israel has removed archaeological relics from the occupied Palestinian territories, and in September last year bombed the most important storage depot of ancient artefacts in Gaza City, pulverising three decades of archaeological work.

A specialist in the restoration and maintenance of antiquities works on cleaning artefacts in dug up during an archaeological excavation in Gaza City. Photograph: Loay Ayyoub/The Observer

Zomlot was invited to meet the museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, and some of its curators on 24 March but said he was given no undertaking the changes would be reversed. Instead, he was offered a tour of the museum, which he turned down.

“In the absence of corrective action, or a clear commitment to address the issues identified, it would not have been appropriate to engage further in a manner that could be interpreted as an endorsement of the current presentation,” Zomlot wrote to Cullinan on 9 April, in a letter seen by the Guardian and New Lines Magazine. The ambassador added he was ready to continue discussions and would welcome a tour “once the necessary corrections have been made”.

The British Museum said in a statement: “We have not removed the term ‘Palestine’ from displays and continue to refer to it across a series of galleries, both contemporary and historic, and on our website.”

This appeared to conflict with the photographic proof of changes, and earlier remarks attributed to the museum. The name Palestine does remain on some exhibits, such as maps of the ancient Middle East in the Egypt room.

Since the March meeting, Zomlot has appealed to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office to intervene. The British Museum is publicly funded but run by an independent board of trustees, chaired by the former conservative chancellor, George Osborne. The ambassador hopes, however, that the UK government will persuade the museum to align with its own recognition of Palestine.

Husam Zumlot: ‘Erasing our past is erasing our present.’ Photograph: Husam Zumlot

“I sent a letter to the minister in charge in the Foreign Office, and we are waiting for [a response]” Zomlot said. “For me, this is not only a political issue. This is not only a legal issue. This is not even just a historical issue. This is an existential issue. Because erasing our past is erasing our present.”

A British government spokesperson said: “Museums and galleries in the UK operate independently of the government, which means that decisions relating to the management of their collections are a matter for their trustees.”

The British Museum has yet to explain the changes, which became widely known only after the Telegraph reported on 14 February that they had been made following concerns by a pressure group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).

The British Museum has been quoted as saying ‘the historic use of the term Palestine … is in some circumstances no longer meaningful’. Photograph: Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images

UKLFI said it had sent a letter to Cullinan arguing that “several maps and descriptions retroactively apply the term ‘Palestine’ to periods in which no such entity existed and risk obscuring the history of Israel and the Jewish people”.

The changes to the exhibits however, predated the UKLFI letter. Cullinan reportedly saw the letter only after the Telegraph story was published.

The museum has not explained its reasoning. UKLFI quoted the museum as telling the group: “Audience testing has shown that the historic use of the term Palestine … is in some circumstances no longer meaningful.”

The word “Palestinian” has been replaced by “Canaanite” in a panel about the Hyksos rulers of Egypt from the 18th to the 16th centuries BC, while mention of Palestine and the Philistines has been removed from a text about the Phoenicians, who the new text says were “locally known as “Canaanites”.

Scholars of the ancient world have generally been sceptical about the need for a change. Canaan is mentioned frequently in the Bible but in few other contemporary inscriptions from the late bronze age, and when it is, it is usually used to refer to a variety of people and places along what is now the Levantine coast.

Peleset, which is believed to be the root of the name Palestine, appears in inscriptions in Egypt from the 12th century BC referring to a community in the Southern Levant. Before that, the most common names for the region were Djahi and Retenu. There are also later inscriptions mentioning Israel, and the kingdom of Judah is mentioned on a monument dating to the ninth century BC. Both kingdoms survived for several centuries in the iron age, alongside the five city states of “Philistia”, including Gaza, which are frequently mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

Scholars say that Philistia or Palestine was the name which stuck through the centuries that followed and variants were used by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans and persisted into the modern age.

“The decision to remove Palestine has nothing to do with historical accuracy,” Marchella Ward, a lecturer in classical studies at the Open University, said. “It’s no less accurate than any other term. In fact, given that it’s used so frequently in historical sources rather than in biblical sources, one might say it’s more accurate than other terms.”

The picture is confused by the fact that people in ancient times did not think in terms of nationalities, and the terms outsiders used to refer to a certain people or place may have nothing to do with what those people called themselves or their homeland.

Josephine Quinn, professor of ancient history at Cambridge University, argued that it was futile and distorting to portray names used thousands of years ago in the Middle East as relevant to what should happen now.

Quinn said: “The worrying thing for me is the idea that it matters, that ancient categories have any direct relevance to politics today, or that they can justify or excuse genocide in the contemporary world.”